Working on haltering with Austin

I’ve been wanting to play with Austin, a young draft-cross gelding who lives at the rescue. He’s had a bit of training in the past, including being halter trained and being trained to lead. However, he’s pretty shy, a little skeptical of people and hasn’t had anybody working with him consistently recently.

When I first started volunteering, about 2 months ago, he’d turn and run if I tried to approach him. Gradually, he’s gotten to recognize me as I’ve come in and out of the pasture and he’s started to get a bit more interested. Just in the past week or two, he’s become a lot more friendly, even letting me come over and scratch his shoulder or hind quarters. 

I tried last week to work with him on haltering and was not successful at all. He’d let me put a rope around his neck, but was super unconfident about me holding on to the rope and wanted nothing to do with me putting a halter on him. I realized it wasn’t working and decided to save it for another day. Later, I realized that my rate of reinforcement had probably been much too low. By having a rope around his neck, I was putting quite a bit of (mental) pressure on him. He was unconfident and couldn’t escape and I wasn’t providing enough reinforcement for him to know what he was suppose to be doing. 

We tried again on Saturday and everything worked out excellently. I worked with him on one side of the pasture fence, and me on the other side of the fence. This served two purposes:

1) He felt much more confident because he could escape and back off out of range whenever he wanted too. At the same time, I knew I had to use a minimal amount of force/pressure or else I’d frighten him off. 

2) Working with him in the pasture is complicated by the fact that he shares the pasture with 10 other horses. 10 mouthy, pushy, greedy horses. It’s hard to work with him when I’m trying to defend both of use from a draft-cross, 2 mouthy yearlings, a few donkeys and others. 

I started by just having him eat treats, then progressed to touching his neck and face. Then, I started rubbing the side of his face and his neck with the halter. I was trying to keep an extremely high rate of reinforcement to keep the session positive and he got quite a few treats throughout the day. 

Next we moved to him sticking his nose in the halter in exchange for a treat. When he was sticking his nose in all the way, I began rubbing the cheek pieces of the halter up and down the sides of his face so he could remember what that felt like. 

Austin had a lot of trouble with the back of the halter passing behind his ears. So, we stopped worrying about his nose being in the halter and worked for awhile with things passing behind his ears, until he became a bit more comfortable with that. 

At this point, things got a bit more complicated and messy. Tootie, one of the yearlings, kept grabbing the halter and trying to pull it off of Austin. Austin found this more than slightly annoying. Also, I had been standing in front of him and to his right side for most of the time. He got a bit uneasy at first when I moved over to his left side to tie the halter. But we were able to work through these issues and after a handful of tries, I got the halter all the way on him and tied.

It took about 5 sessions of 3-4 minutes for me to get a halter on him. The whole process went pretty fast since he had been haltered trained before. He just needed a short refresher course on how the process worked. Hopefully, next time it will take a bit less time and he’ll start to learn that haltering can be a pretty positive experience.